


Trigger Warning

by InfiniteMelody



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Rape, Rape Recovery, Sadstuck, eventual stridercest, will add trigger warnings as i go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-29 20:06:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfiniteMelody/pseuds/InfiniteMelody
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Knight of Time, you sure don't remember a whole lot about your past. Maybe there's a reason for that.<br/>Heed the trigger warnings, all ye who enter, as it's gonna get rough and a whole lot rougher before it gets better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snapshots

**Author's Note:**

> I'll post specific trigger warnings at the beginning of each chapter. It's gonna get worse before it gets better.  
> TW: Rape, Non-con, major character deaths (though they're only in this chapter so I don't really count them as major characters, whatever), alcoholism, implied childhood abuse, etc.  
> Welcome to the origin story.

The first memory you have is not, in fact, your memory at all. You no longer remember what your actual chronological first memory of your life is, but you remember watching a videotape on your television once of a younger, fuzzier version of you sitting in front of a Christmas tree in footie pajamas, mangling a wrapped box and accidentally flinging a set of blocks across the room in your excitement. A younger version of your Bro sat next to you, laughing and helping you pick up the scattered toys. You don’t remember this memory from your own point of view, but from the impassive view of your mother’s camcorder, her laughter hollow and electronic from the other end of a television screen, captured in an electronic prison and unable to replay it in your own mind.

You shut the television off and stare at the reflection on the glass of the screen in silence. Words and thoughts tumble in your mind. This is not the first time you’ve been reminded of a memory after the fact and had to rewrite the details into your mind. In fact, this has been happening more and more recently, to the point where you often wonder if the things you remember are your memories at all, or dreams and second hand stories you’ve obsessively collected and plastered to the inside of your mind, hoarding information and storing it away into the cavern of your brain. You don’t know when it started, whether you forgot a majority of your childhood, but you know when you started to remember. It was as if for the first twelve years of your life, someone forgot to press the record button and you only have occasional glimpses of your past.

Snapshots of your life sometimes filter through.

Moments of memories of childhood friends come and gone. Your parents, back when they were together and you were one big happy family with the two of them and their two children, the epitome of the American dream with a big house with a picket fence and a tire swing in the front yard. Your father, a tall and muscular man with light strawberry blonde hair, which your brother was fortunate enough to inherit, working on the family car in your driveway as your brother teaches you to skateboard, your mother humming to herself as she works in the garden.

Your first day of school in the first grade, where a few kids made fun of your unusual albino complexion, but for the most part ignored you, except for a few intrepid loners who became your companions for the remainder of grade school. John, who’s father got a job in Washington and had to move at the end of your second grade year, but whom you’ve kept in touch with over the internet. Rose, your cousin (or something… you’re not sure, Bro said her mom was his sister, and you’re his brother, so doesn’t that make you her uncle? That’s weird to think about, so you try not to think about it much) who lives in New York, who you’ve gotten really close with, introduced you to Jade over pesterchum and you introduced her to John, completing your circle of friends. You don’t remember the lessons taught by your teachers, though you have the knowledge ingrained in you.

Shortly before your fifth birthday you remember waking up in the middle of the night to the telephone ringing, your mother answering it in the next room. You can’t make out what she says so you watch the light from under your doorway to the bedroom you share with Bro, shadows pacing through the illuminated crack. Her voice grows increasingly more frantic and you start to panic; you’ve never heard her like this before. You look over to the other bed in the room and are met with amber eyes mirroring your look of worry.

  
The door opens and in the doorway stands your mother, grief stricken, as she clutches the phone to her chest. You and Dirk sit up and regard her with worry, as she gasps out that your father’s life was taken in a massive accident out on the highway. Bro is the first out of bed to be at her side, you follow shortly after and are pulled into a hug; you all stumble to the master bedroom and collapse on the bed, tears in your eyes as you cry yourself to sleep.  
It was the only time you ever saw your brother cry.

Your mother lost her job and picked up a nasty drinking habit, leaving her mostly comatose on the couch while crime dramas played for hours on end after you got home from school. You preferred when she was asleep, because if she was awake she was just a barely contained mess underneath a careful poker face. For the next two years your brother functioned as your guardian, when he wasn’t busy with his friends and brushing you off as the uncool little brother he didn’t want to hang out with. You’d follow him around when he was home though; learning everything you could about being cool and ironic. He taught you how to feed yourself, do basic chores, stuff that your mother would usually do but was too inebriated to in addition to some rad music and how he made his own beats with turntables he bought using money from a paper route he’d had.

Your mother ranged from deliriously happy and functioning to depressed and emotional on the couch or locked in her room, to angry for no apparent reason, and you’d decided the best way to deal with her outbursts was to lock yourself in your room and pretend that nothing was happening. She’d alternate between yelling and throwing things to weeping and locking herself in her room and sometimes she’d even seek you out and apologize, covering you with kisses and affection you knew would only come after she’d trashed the kitchen particularly hard. Eventually things would calm down or your brother would talk her back into a normal mood until she started drinking again. You’d just play on your computer or mix some music until he came back and played video games with you.

One night she went off worse than usual and Bro decided to join you in your room until she calmed down. There was banging on your door but you both ignored it in favor of the shitty skateboarding game you were getting some sick combos in. Bro always won, but you still had fun playing with him when he decided to grace you with his unbelievably cool presence. Things fell silent and you didn’t think anything of it, falling asleep on your side at the foot of your bed with the controller still in your hands.

The next thing you knew your Bro was shaking you awake and pushing you towards the door, saying something about the hospital and how you needed to leave right now. You walked out the front door and saw the bright red and white lights of the ambulance backing out of your driveway, jolting you awake. You turned to Bro to ask what was going on, but he only shook his head and led the way to the car.

You remember sitting in a hospital waiting room staring at the gritty ceiling tiles and hearing your brother’s footsteps approach, the clomping of motorcycle boots before he plops into the seat next to you. After a while a doctor comes out and tells you your mother is good to go home again with heavy bandages around her wrists, just to keep her away from sharp objects and to call 911 if anything happens. You and your bro load her into the car and take her home; a week later you’re back in the hospital and this time the doctors weren’t able to revive her.

At the tender age of eight and sitting in a shitty hospital waiting room, you realize you’re an orphan.

Unlike your father’s funeral, your mother’s is held on a rainy and cold day in the middle of December, shortly before Christmas. People whose faces and names you don’t remember give you their condolences, tell you they’re sorry for your loss, and sometimes provide a funny story about your mother before her death. You’re numb to it all and barely paying attention. What could these people possibly know about your mother? The person they’re describing sounds nothing like the temperamental woman you knew.

You stand next to your brother at the service and realize at some point your hand found his and was squeezing it tightly. They deliver her cremated ashes to you afterwards in a ceramic urn. Bro makes no move to take it from the attendant, so you decide to take it and keep it. This marks the first of the dead things in jars you eventually have a collection of.

You go home and the next day Bro tells you he’s going to be your guardian, for all intents and purposes. You tell him that he pretty much already was before your mother died, so nothing will change there. He also tells you that he can’t be your guardian officially until he graduates and can move to Houston to work on being a DJ full time, so while he’s working on school and has a job at a local garage to support you both, you’ll still have to feed yourself and do your own homework when you get home from school. You shrug. You’ve been doing that already.

“No big deal, we’ve got this, I’ve got this, lil man,” he says, giving you a crooked grin. It’s the only one you’ll remember seeing on him for several years.

Sometimes Bro needs to leave for several days at a time, often out wooing club owners on weekends to get them to give him a job, so he gets one of his friends to stop over and stay with you. You’re offended that he thinks you need a babysitter, but give up on arguing with him when you realize most of them just want a place to crash for the night and watch tv, have some food and smoke a bowl away from their own nosy parents. Most of the time they leave you alone. But sometimes you decide to join them in watching TV or playing video games.

Bro’s best friend comes over the most often when Bro needs a babysitter for you, a tall lanky brunette named Dan who likes to get a little close with you physically. A little too close for your liking, frankly. You’re actually quite a cuddler when you want to be, but usually that was with your mother before she kicked her own bucket. Bro wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and you didn’t mind, but sometimes you liked to curl up next to someone while watching TV. You’re a kid, so sue you. It turns out Dan didn’t mind this, in fact he encouraged you, spending the quality time with you that you so wanted with someone, anyone now that you never got to see Bro and barely had any friends in school. Sometimes his hands would roam, tickling you, touching you, until they’d slip not-so-innocently under your clothes. But he didn’t take it any further than that until you got comfortable, leaning against him while watching some cartoons on tv. Then his hands were moving again, this time under your pants, and you didn’t protest because while it felt weird it wasn’t like it hurt or anything, in fact it was starting to feel kind of good, and oh hello you didn’t realize that was a sensation you’d like until he started touching you that way. He pulled you into his lap and pressed his lips to your ear, whispering, “Feels good, doesn’t it? Don’t tell your brother,” and you gasped, arching back to press against his chest. A warm feeling began to pool in your belly and your limbs twitched, lost in the sensations that were being thrust upon you. His hands continued to travel, scraping his nails up your torso and tilting your head to the side so he could kiss along your jaw, your neck, biting at your shoulder; you flinched and tried to move away, but his arms only held you tighter.

You started to panic, feeling trapped, but unable to move, heart beating out of your chest. He released your throbbing member and ground your hips against his, and you were able to feel his own erection through his jeans. Dread started to pool in your stomach, though for what you didn’t know, you just knew you didn’t want to be here right now, you had to get out, had to get away, but his hands were stronger than you and kept you in place, digging in painfully when you tried to get away. Suddenly you were being pinned to the couch, your pants and underwear dragged down to your knees and your arms pinned behind your back by one strong hand. You started to protest, to shout, until his other hand struck you across the back of your head, sending stars across your vision, and forced your face into the cushions. You flailed and thrashed as best you could as you felt a hand parting your ass cheeks, felt something wet drip between them and something else touching down there that you most definitely didn’t want down there no matter how good you were feeling earlier. “Shut the fuck up,” he growled fiercely before you felt the most unbearable pain of your life, a burning and tearing sensation that caused your brain to overload and tune out.

You feel like it’s not real, like everything that’s happening is just on a tv screen somewhere and you’re the impassive audience chewing popcorn and passing judgment on the actors in this movie. But one of the actors looks like you, moans like you, and screams like you while Dan has his way with your limp body.  
The movie fades to black and you don’t remember what happens after that, but you’re aware of your body feeling heavy, your mind hazy as you become aware of the sounds outside your head. You hear voices, and you’re not sure which are real and which are the ones in your head telling you everything will be alright but that you’re a horrible human being for liking what just happened, you had to have liked it, didn’t you, because you felt good and got off on it too, right?

 

  
The next thing you remember for certain is waking up in your bed, struggling to crack your eyes open because they hurt from all the tears you’ve cried, you must have cried them, as your pillow is wet and you don’t know how else that could have happened. You shift under your covers and immediately regret that decision, pain shooting up your spine and you let out a choked breath. The noise causes movement next to your bed and your eyes flick over to see Bro slouched in a chair next to you, shades discarded, watching over you as you sleep. He reaches a hand out to you and your gut reaction is to immediately flinch backwards. More pain shoots throughout your body and you grind to a halt, a pained whimper escaping your throat. Bro stops, hand outstretched towards you, and settles for putting it lightly on top of the hand you had outside the covers closest to him, leather gloves and cool fingers barely touching your skin. The two of you stare each other down for a long moment before he speaks.

“I never should have trusted him. I’m so sorry, Dave. This will never happen again.” His voice is soft, apologetic, and his poker face is completely gone as his expression shows the tumult of emotions he’s going through, which you’re sure your face is going through as well. Rather than say anything back (you’re pretty sure based on the pain in your throat your vocal chords are shredded anyways) you flip your hand over and grasp his hand in yours, a silent tear leaking from your eye as you feel something break within your heart. You feel safe knowing he's there to watch over you, a comfort that travels from the hand he holds through the newfound hollowness in your chest as you drift to sleep again. He doesn’t leave your side, his jaw tightening on occasion as he decides what he’s going to do.

 

You prefer not to think about these events, and indeed have spent years perfecting the art of blocking out bad memories, but lately your mind has been bringing them up without your consent, turning your dreams into nightmares and creeping into your waking thoughts as well. As more of your memories make their way from the blanker side of your memory into the forefront of your thoughts, more of the unpleasant ones come back to haunt you as well.

One day you wake up and realize you’ve forgotten how to smile. When you try to fake one, the corner of your mouth pulls up awkwardly in the mirror in a grin you’ve since learned to turn into a sarcastic smirk, but you can never truly smile again. You play it off, scoffing to yourself about the irony of the cool kid losing his ability to smile when he never used it in the first place, hiding it under your aloof façade.

 

Your name is Dave Strider, and at the age of twelve you realize that not only are you broken, but you never even had the chance to know what it was like to feel whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It gets better, I promise. Every superhero needs a backstory, as does every villain. There will eventually be happiness and porn, it just might take 15 chapters to get there. No promises. But if you're willing to stick with me, then I promise there'll be a very rewarding ending in it for you.  
> Thanks for reading.


	2. Roll With It

  
For a while, you forget.  
For a while, you get to be a kid again. You allow the painful memories of your parents’ respective deaths and the events that happened back in your old hometown to wither and fade. Everything that isn’t immediate and happening to you right this very moment fades into the static at the back of your mind.

  
You and your brother moved from Odessa to Houston shortly after what you like to refer to as the major blank spot in your memory- exactly the amount of time it took for him to find an apartment and settle the remainder of your parent’s debts. He had mentioned how he wanted to move to the city after graduating so he could be a full time DJ, but you’re pretty sure he jumped the gun by a few years, since he was only 16 at the time. He told you not to worry about it, says something about a thing called a GED. You remember him helping you pack all of your things in boxes and anything that wasn’t essential or that you deemed too “baby” for you was put on the front lawn the next day in a massive garage sale, and then you sat through the longest car ride of your life as you drove across the expanse of the lone star state.

  
The apartment you moved to wasn’t in the greatest neighborhood, and Bro didn’t let you go outside to play with any of the kids in your complex or the surrounding neighborhood. Not that you had much of a desire to be around strangers in this foreign city in the middle of the summer- it was too hot and you didn’t have the patience for their inevitable questions, children filled with curiosity to an annoying degree, and you didn’t like being around strangers. Your new home was smaller than your childhood home in Odessa, only one room and a bathroom with a “kitchen” in the corner that you and your brother shared. He kept promising that once his career as a DJ kicked off he’d get you guys a better place to live, but this would have to do for now. You didn’t have any objections, as long as you had a place to sleep at night and your brother there with you, you didn’t mind having to share the bed with him, his larger frame curled around you helping you feel safe when nightmares consumed your dreams in the night.

  
You’ve always been perceptive. You’re not sure when it started, but you’ve always been able to pick up on things faster than other people have. Some may call it maturity, an unfortunate side effect of what you suffered at such a young age. Others call it intuition. You just call it paying attention.

  
Before your third grade year began Bro took you to the closest school in your district where a nice lady had you take some tests that made your head hurt with how incredibly easy they were; the stuff they taught you back at your old school was way harder than whatever the inner city curriculum was considered at your grade level, so while you spent your time re-learning everything you already knew from last year, you were still so young that they couldn’t bump you up a grade level without alienating you from your age group. You complained to Bro that you were bored, but stayed quiet in your classes, one part trying to play it cool and aloof in front of your new class and two parts anxiety about being around all these strangers, completely surrounded by kids who didn’t know the meaning of a personal bubble, and away from everything you ever knew. So while you were still singled out as the new kid in school, you didn’t show your fears on your face, rolling with whatever they decided to throw at you. You played it as quiet and invisible as possible, trying to keep out of the spotlight and not trusting the people around you who tried to befriend you, only feeling paranoid that they’d only want to be your friend because you were a novelty, the new kid, you had something that they wanted. As it turns out, not everyone agreed with this new game plan.

  
Bro recognized the dangers of being the new kid in school- just because they preach anti-bullying to the masses doesn’t mean kids will listen, and at the end of the day he decided it was better if you knew how to defend yourself. He first taught you how to fight hand-to-hand, the kind of stuff that wouldn’t need one of his collection of shitty swords that you weren’t ready to learn yet, after you came home with hunched shoulders and a ripped backpack, reluctantly telling him about how some of the kids at your new school didn’t take kindly to your sarcasm and your non-traditional appearance. So in between homework and dinner he’d take the time to teach you how to punch and not break your knuckles, how to dodge opponents and use their weight against them, taking to the roof of your apartment building when you ran out of room in your apartment. He taught you to be quick, to be smarter rather than stronger than your opponent, how to notice their tells and what moves they were going to pull next and using that to either get away or hurt themselves in the process. You were a quick learner, your obsession with paying close attention finally paying off.

  
A few weeks later your brother got a call from the school principal; you’d been in a fight. While your attackers walked away with a collective three broken glasses, two split lips, one broken nose and bruised knuckles, you remained unscathed. The principal was pissed- you’ve never seen a full grown man rant quite that much and threaten to expel you in quite so many colorful words, but in the end your transgressions were considered excusable in self-defense. Bro treated you to ice cream afterwards, but not after a stern lecture about how you should try not to get caught next time. You assured him that there wouldn’t be a next time after how hard you handed their asses to them, no one would want to mess with you in the future. He was beaming with pride, and as he ruffled your hair affectionately you realized how much you liked making him proud.

  
One day Bro came home with a sewing machine and a box of fabric tucked under his arms, kicking the door shut with his heel as you stared at some cartoon on tv. You gave him an inquiring look, one eyebrow raised over your miniature anime shades. Tossing the box down on the table and setting up the machine, he explains that while talking to your estranged sister, Roxy, over the phone, he got the idea to start making and selling puppets to try to earn some extra cash. He explains that he’s always been good with his hands, how he used to make robots when he was younger, but fell out of it over time and due to lack of money. And while most of the local clubs wouldn’t let him play since he was under 21, he had to find an alternative form of employment that still let him spend time at home to take care of you.

  
You supposed there were weirder career paths that he could take.

  
He then shows you a diagram for his line of puppets, and proceeds to explain what a “smuppet” is, explaining that sometimes adults like to play with toys too, though these ones are a little different from your standard stuffed animal. He tries to go on but you don’t really understand the rest, and he sighs, saying he’ll explain again when you’re older. Part of you suspects what they’re for, but your head starts to hurt and your vision feels fuzzy for some reason, so you tune him out after a while. You feel a little queasy but accept that Bro’s just trying to pay the bills and look out for the both of you, especially when he gets excited about “niche markets” and “unexplored revenue streams.” So while his new form of self-employment seems kind of lame (seriously, who makes puppets?) he scoffs and tells you it’s ironic, that a kid like you couldn’t possibly understand. You accept his unspoken challenge and decide that whether you really understand what all this irony stuff is or not, you’re a Strider, and you roll with it.

  
Bro sews like a fiend, scissors and thread and needles flying as he sets into motion. Once a few prototypes are done he sets up a camera and some extra bed sheets into a makeshift set in the corner and begins making movies with the puppets, though he usually does it when you’re out of the house as he knows it weirds you out.

  
As it turns out, there really is a market for whatever Bro makes on the internet, and before you know it Bro has gone from staying up until the early hours of the morning glued to his sewing machine making miniscule stitches and stuffing felt and fleece bodies, sometimes one or two boxes leaving the apartment a week to a veritable fuck ton of fluffy smuppety buttock vying for space with you and Bro in the apartment. His customers are still few and the website is still relatively unknown, but what few customers he has have rather deep pockets, the demand for more of his videos and content growing steadily every day.

  
While irony has always been a tenet in the household of Strider, you never realized that what you thought was an ironic obsession with puppets could actually turn out to be a profitable enough enterprise for you to live off of. So you’re a little shocked when you come back to the apartment one day and find your stuff packed up in boxes again, jaw dropping while you stare at Bro piling things into the cardboard prisons you remember all too well from the last time you moved. He stops you before you say anything, reading your panicked expression all too easily.

  
“Chill, lil bro. We’re just moving up the stairs to some better digs than this dump. You’re gonna get your own room and everything. Wanted it to be a surprise, heh…” he drawls. “Wanna see?”

  
You still stare at him in disbelief until he brushes past you, looking back from the end of the hall where the stairs led to the floors around you. He gestures in front of him, a _come on lil princess ain’t got all day_ implicit in his stance and you hurriedly follow him, dropping your backpack inside the door to your old apartment and shutting the door.

The new apartment is the same that you’ll live in for the time to come, a spacious two bedroom apartment on the top floor of your apartment building, complete with air conditioning and a fridge that actually works. He’s already got most of your stuff stuck in one room, and you can see boxes littered throughout of the meager belongings you two have shared. You see the space he’s already set aside for his set of turntables once he buys them back from the pawn shop, and he shows you where you two will have a couch once you find one either suitable enough to pilfer from a roadside or buy from a store, where you’ll finally have a place to put the TV instead of on the floor and play videogames without having to crowd in on the screen to see.

  
And this is all wonderful and great and you should be happy, but a thought has been nagging at the back of your mind since you stepped foot in your supposed new apartment. You’ve never had to worry that you’d need to learn the value of a dollar because you were always conscious of exactly how much money everything in your life cost. Your memories are all too vivid of how you and Bro would share a pack of ramen at night in the early days just after you moved to Houston, or how when he’d make you meals he’d always feed you more than he’d eat himself so you wouldn’t complain later when you might not be able to eat dinner. You knew more about coupon clipping and penny pinching than most people did, how to watch for sales on items that you knew you might need and how to repair things that were broken when your peers would simply throw them away and buy new ones; you still wore sneakers with duct tape around the sole holding them together, and wore them with pride when you could. You knew there was an equivalent exchange when you needed to buy something expensive, and that something usually came at the cost of eating eggs and bread for a few weeks or Bro having to hawk his turntables down at the pawn shop to cover the electric bill.

  
You stopped Bro’s little tour to ask, “So how are we gonna pay for this place anyways?”

  
And at first he looks offended, like you’d doubt his abilities to somehow magically pull money for this out of his ass, but quickly drops back into the patented poker face you know so well. “You might not have noticed but business is booming from the website, so we can finally move out of that shithole and into a place where you and me can actually breathe. Don’t worry about it, I got this,” he dismisses your worries and turns back to show you how the bathroom has a retractable shower head. And while you still feel a bit uneasy about the whole situation, you trust Bro, and you decide to roll with it.

  
Things get better once you move to the top of the building. You don’t have to listen to your neighbors screech at each other anymore, and access to the roof is pretty much the sole property of you and Bro (aside from the old couple who live across the hall from you, the only other tenants on this floor who occasionally like to watch the sunset from the roof) meaning you can learn more about fighting and strife with your brother more. He starts teaching you how to use a sword, and you use wooden practice swords and occasionally strife with him before he decides you’re capable enough to use a blade, albeit a shitty dulled one. You’re just excited to finally be able to hack at things with an actual blade now. And now that you’re working with a real weapon, your lessons with Bro start to get serious. Now that you’re able to actually hurt yourself or someone else, he watches you like a hawk, moving with superhuman speed to stop your blade from piercing an air conditioning vent or prevent you from falling off the roof. For the first time in your life you start to get scars across your body from your sessions with Bro, and you learn firsthand how unpleasant it is to be on the receiving end of a sword and subsequently a needle and thread sewing your skin back together.

  
While you sit on the toilet in your bathroom with your brother fixing your wounds after a particularly hard loss, he decides now is an ideal time to lecture you on keeping your fighting lessons to yourself if you can, and to be as discrete as possible about your injuries. When you ask why, he looks at you hard for a moment, looking over the tops of his shades into your eyes and sighs, “I’m gonna level with you kid, I’m not exactly supposed to be teaching you this shit when you’re this young. Even if it was just an accident, if the cops find out I’ve been letting you play with swords and shit that could kill you, it’ll get you taken away from me. Probably put in the foster system. And that’s the last thing I want to happen. I’m teaching you this shit so you don’t ever have to get beaten up again- don’t give me that look you lil’ shit I’m trying to help ya- so let’s just keep this between the two of us, ok?”

  
You nod. You’re pretty sure you already knew most of this, but due to the normal unspoken nature of your relationship with your brother you’d figured most of this would go unsaid and understood by both parties previously. But the fact he’s laying it all out for you tells you just how serious the situation is.

  
It turns out this is only a secret you need to keep from school authorities, since you’d unintentionally spilled the beans to Rose about your fighting lessons years before. You’ve been friends with Rose ever since you two were little, but since you and Bro were broke and basically stranded in Texas you couldn’t really go visit the Lalondes in New York, save for when they would fly themselves down for Christmas and New Years. When you told Rose about your special form of brotherly bonding time she was primarily concerned about your safety and wellbeing, but didn’t make a big deal out of it like Bro seemed to be panicking about now. You tell him there’s nothing to worry about, you’re not that bad at lying and you’ll deal with it if anyone asks. You’re a Strider; you roll with it.

  
Despite you never asking, Bro surprises you with your own computer, and you finally have a way to communicate with Rose and play on the internet without hogging your brother’s shitty laptop all the time. You meet Jade through some kid-oriented game website, probably Neopets or Gaia or something, and John by trolling forums dedicated to the shitty movies you mock mercilessly and pretend to love ironically, and together with Rose they turn into stronger friends with you than any of the kids you’ve met in real life. For once in your life, everything is good, you are content, but in the back of your mind you’re not sure you’re truly happy. And while that troubles you, you figure it’ll go away on it’s own if you throw yourself into your hobbies, your photography, comics, videogames, and your friends and for a while, you mistake peace with bliss. But you feel like there’s something missing, some part of your life that’s not complete.

  
You still feel empty, but figure that’s probably normal for a prepubescent teen, and you roll with it.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the blatant overuse of the title of this chapter in the chapter itself. I realized during editing and re-reading that the theme was in there and I think I may have overdone it a bit.  
> Roxy is Dirk and Dave's older sister, older than Dirk by 9/10 years (and Dave is 8 years younger than Dirk), and the oldest of the three technically; she's the child of their father's previous marriage, so while she and Dirk grew up together, she got pregnant with Rose in high school and had gone her separate ways by the time Dave rolled around. Their parents didn't approve and basically disowned her, writing her out of the will, but she and Dirk are still close, and she helped bail them out a few times when Dirk couldn't pay bills or for groceries all the time.  
> I think I'll write the next chapter from Bro's perspective, that'll answer some more questions.  
> Feedback is always welcome and encouraged!


	3. Static

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave remembers John. How could he forget?  
> TW: Do I need to tag for memories? No real bad triggers, just Dave experiencing his first trigger bringing up memories.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First time formatting pesterlogs and so far it's not cooperating with me. I'll keep trying to fix it, but you may have to settle for what it's like right now. My apologies.

You return from another busy day of school to the relative cool of your apartment, grabbing a bottle of apple juice from the fridge as you make your way to your bedroom. Dropping your backpack on the floor, homework quickly forgotten inside you instead delve straight into booting up your computer. There’s been a sick nasty beat pounding it’s way through your head all day and you need to get it down in your software before it escapes. You get into a groove with your new mix, not paying attention to how much time is passing until you come to a good stopping point and notice your pesterchum icon jumping at the bottom of your screen. You keep forgetting to disable whatever that thing is that automatically logs you in when you turn your computer on. But for now, it seems that John is pestering you, and the corner of your mouth twitches up in what could be qualified as a grin.

**\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 5:35 pm --**

EB: hey dave!!  
TG: john my man  
TG: to what do i owe this honor  
EB: well actually, i had something i wanted to talk to you about!  
TG: whats up dude  
TG: you finally ask out that serket chick or what  
TG: dont tell me you chickened out again 

It’s pretty much the only pressing thing you can think of that he’d want to talk about, and you like teasing him about it because he gets all flustered. One of the main reasons you’d contacted John in the first place was to mess with him, but you two ended up becoming friends, ruining your whole plan to mess with some poor chump on the internet. You just didn’t have the heart to completely rip him to shreds, but he’s proven to be a pretty good person to talk to, and a good friend.

EB: no!! not yet, she doesn’t even know i exist dude you know this!  
EB: anyways i was wondering, cause you’re like my best bro and all, even though we’re friends through the internet  
EB: but you remind me a lot of a friend i used to have back when i lived in texas!  
EB: his name was dave too, so i was wondering if maybe you were, like, the same person!  
TG: dude do you have any idea how many guys named dave there are in the state of texas  
TG: i cant even go to the grocery store without seeing at least three people named dave just working there  
TG: i mean its flattering that everyone wants to be me but come on you think mothers would learn some new names to name their kids  
TG: I guess sir biznasty mcawesome was taken already or is frowned upon by whoever lets you get birth certificates or something because i cant think of another more awesome name than that and mine to name your kid  
TG: can you  
TG: be honest john  
EB: haha you even babble like he used to too!  
EB: i’m pretty sure you’re him cause you’re waaaay too similar!  
EB: tell me, do you still wear those pointy anime shades?

You frown. There’s been quite a few things about yourself you’ve shared with John, but you left that detail out, as it hasn’t seemed relevant to your conversations yet. 

TG: …  
TG: how do you know that  
EB: ha! i knew it!  
EB: and your last name’s strider, right?  
EB: dave come on man don’t tell me you don’t remember your old buddy john?  
EB: we used to hang out at recess under the oak trees and we always buddied up for class projects  
EB: and you’d come play at my house or i’d come to yours and we’d play video games and read comics and trade pokemon cards?

As you stare at his words on the screen, your mind begins to feel fuzzy, like static encroaching on your thought processes. You start seeing flashes in your mind of the things he’s talking about, a young boy with messy black hair and buckteeth with glasses too large for his face, his smile wide and bright when he catches sight of you. The one story house he’d lived in that you visited frequently after school because you could walk with him to his house on the way to your own. How his house always smelled like sugar, something was always freshly baked and waiting for you two when you stopped in. How your brother had to come find you and drag you home because you never wanted to leave John’s house, it was too much fun. Muffled voices fill your ears, like someone turned a television on in another room but you recognize the voices, the younger and higher voice of John, a lower and smoother voice that must be his father, but it doesn’t sound like any kind of language you know, anything you’re familiar with. It’s like watching a movie back in your mind, memories of a life you’re not sure are yours, and you remember this feeling with the sickening recognition of deja vu. This isn’t the first time you’re remembering something from another persons’ perspective. 

EB: remember the time we marathoned ghostbusters movies during a thunderstorm and the lights went out and we ended up telling ghost stories in that fort we built?  
EB: that was awesome! 

You’re vaguely aware the text on screen is continuing to pile up, but in the static combined with these flashes of memory cycling through your mind you pay no attention to John as he rambles on. You close your eyes as the fuzziness in your skull continues to build, a stream of memories leaking through like a crack in a dam you didn’t realize was there, making you dizzy.

EB: oh man i missed you dude i’m so glad i found you again!  
EB: kinda funny we were both on the same movie forum and that’s how we found each other!

Of course it’s John, how did you miss that before? His same love of movies and obsession with Nic Cage, his ignorance of popular music, the way he mocks your lack of sports knowledge. How could you forget? It’s John, your John, the friend you were inseparable from in elementary school, who lived three blocks from you and your family, who hung out with you any chance you two got. And then he left, his father got transferred to a better job in Seattle, or did you move first? Wait, when did you even lose track of John? You try thinking back, retracing your steps, searching your memories that are distressingly blank around that time period before a painful twinge happens just behind your eyes, stopping you in your tracks.

EB: i thought i’d never be able to talk to you again, after we moved to washington i tried to call you but your phone was disconnected!  
EB: so i tried asking some of our old classmates but they said you moved out of odessa to somewhere else  
EB: it’s like you vanished for a few years there!  
EB: but i’m glad i found you again  
EB: we can go back to being best buds! well, we kind of already are, but even more now!  
EB: dave?  
EB: you still there?  
EB: earth to daaaaaaaave

The twinge bursts into a full blown headache, and you gasp at the sudden onslaught of pain, stars erupting behind your eyelids. Your hands leap from the keys to massage your temples, but you only succeed in knocking your shades off your face and onto the desk with a clatter. The throbbing in your skull eventually cedes into a dull ache, and you come back to your senses completely confused as to what the fuck just happened. You didn’t hurt yourself recently, no sudden hits to the head, not even an errant smuppet thrown at the back of your skull could have caused that much pain so quickly. You’re still mildly freaking out when you hear the notification sound going off on your computer, bringing your attention back to your conversation with John, the one you should probably answer soon before he thinks you’re ignoring him or something.

TG: woah dude cant a guy take a breath without being assaulted by a wall of blue text  
TG: though yeah wow didnt realize it was you until just now too  
TG: glad to see some things never change  
TG: like your obsession with terrible movies and nic cage  
EB: hehe, yup! but my taste in movies isn’t terrible and you know nic cage rocks!  
TG: yeah sure fine hes the best ever  
TG: thats sarcasm btw  
EB: oh yeah? well excuuuuse me mr. movie expert!  
EB: why don’t you tell me what actors i should love instead of the great sir nicolas cage?

Your conversation very quickly devolves into a detailed discussion about movies you both enjoy, sometimes dropping back to fill in details about both of your lives that you’ve both missed over the last three years. You grab some pizza from the kitchen and duck back into your room to eat and continue talking with him, ignoring the persistent ache in your head. When you two finally part ways it’s well past sundown, and you stay up a while longer to breeze through your homework and finish messing with your song from earlier. 

Just as you’re about to go to sleep another name lights up in your pesterchum window, letting you know that Rose has come online. Just who you wanted to talk to, since there’s probably no one better to tell you what’s wrong with your head than the resident psychoanalyst, and it’s annoying that you can’t figure out what’s up with your headache and how you managed to forget John. You’re about to click on her name when she pesters you first.

**\--tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 11:19 pm--**

TT: Isn’t it a little past your bedtime, Dave?  
TG: what can i say i like to live dangerously  
TG: carpe diem or whatever  
TG: staying up late party till dawn  
TG: silverware in the toaster making my own fireworks from cleaning supplies  
TG: kids stuff  
TT: I’m not sure it’s in your best interests to live so dangerously at this point in your life.  
TT: Perhaps if you wait a few years until you’ve matured more, or have adult supervision while you engage in such risky behaviors. Wouldn’t want you to blow a hand off while you make explosives.  
TG: ha like id be dumb enough to actually hurt myself  
TG: pretty sure bro doesnt really give a shit anyways  
TG: hes the one who put the fucking fireworks in the dishwasher in the first place  
TG: and the swords in the fridge  
TG: im used to danger at this point its practically my middle name  
TG: along with beyonce and elizabeth and whatever other stupid middle names people make up when youre trying to make up middle names  
TT: My concerns for your upbringing aside, there was actually something else I wanted to discuss with you.  
TT: John told me you two have a longer history together than previously thought.  
TT: I was curious as to why you’d neglected to share this with me.  
TG: actually it wasnt like i was trying to hide it from you or anything  
TG: i sound like a terrible friend but i actually kinda forgot about him i guess  
TT: You forgot about John?  
TT: Wasn’t he your best friend?  
TG: well yeah  
TG: and he still is i just  
TG: i dunno i cant explain it  
TG: its not just him its like tons of stuff that happened before we moved to houston i cant remember  
TG: its just gone  
TG: im no expert but im pretty sure thats a bad thing  
TT: Yes, usually selective amnesia such as that is considered a negative thing.  
TT: How long has this been happening?  
TG: are you trying to ask me how long ive been forgetting  
TG: how am i even supposed to answer that  
TT: Well, you said you don’t remember much before you moved. So you do remember everything after?  
TG: yeah i guess  
TT: Alright, now that we have a frame of reference for when it happened then we can figure out why you’re blocking out your memory.  
TG: what are you talking about  
TG: blocking what  
TG: this doesnt even make sense dude im just wondering why i cant remember john  
TT: Dave, if you would like my assistance in figuring out your mental block you’re going to have to be receptive to my suggestions.  
TT: I cannot help you if you do not want to help yourself.  
TG: goddamnit rose youre going all psychbabble on me again  
TG: im not crazy i dont need your fucking help  
TG: fuck it forget i said anything

**\--turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 11:47 pm--**

You angrily close out of pesterchum and turn off your computer, deciding enough is enough. Why the hell did you think that would help, that a flighty broad like her would do anything to help you figure out what’s wrong with her head. You stand and shuffle over to your bed, pulling off your shirt and jeans to flop on the mattress. After settling under the covers you calm down a bit, conceding that it’s not really Rose’s fault that you can’t remember. It must just be another fun thing about you that’s messed up, like your family situation and your odd hobbies and the fact that none of the kids at school call you their friend. You guess you’re just glad that you remembered John, that you two can keep being friends after all this time. 

But if you managed to forget John, what else did you forget about? What else is hiding down there in the blank spots in your memory? It bothers you, now that you know you've got this problem and it’s going to drive you crazy until you can fix it. But how can you even fix it?  
You guess you've got some more digging to do, but it can wait until morning. 

Morning doesn't wait for you. You jolt awake, covered in a cold sweat, tangled in your sheets and breathing hard. As soon as you know you’re awake the nightmare you emerged from vanishes from your memory, leaving you grasping at nothing as the haze of sleep draws away from you. You don’t know what it was about, but you look over at the clock and groan. Only two more hours until you’re supposed to wake up for school. You disentangle yourself from your blankets and roll over to go back to sleep, purposefully putting the chills down your back out of your mind. Striders don’t have nightmares, and if they do they don’t go crying about it like little girls. You think of happier subjects and let the dreams pull you under their wing once again.

You and Rose don’t talk about that conversation again, and anytime she tries to bring it up you dance around her with your gift of being able to say nothing with a million lines of useless text and pointless metaphors until she stops trying. You keep trying to remember though, thinking back through what memories you have and grasping at the ends of them, trying to pull them into a cohesive timeline in your head, but most are odds and ends that stick out disjointedly in your mind. Sometimes you’re gifted with a new memory, some place you visited with your family or a conversation you had, and sometimes you get a migraine that doesn’t go away until you’re curled up in a ball under your blankets, pillow covering your head to block out the world. These usually discourage you from thinking about the past too hard, and you content yourself most of the time with the present.  
You figure if anyone knows about your past it’s probably your Bro, but you don’t want to go through the same kind of uncomfortable conversation with him that you had with Rose. You figure that whatever’s back there is buried for a reason, and you’re not sure you want to find out why. In a way it’s almost like your own personal mystery, like you’re the hero of your own sci-fi novel what can’t remember their past and has to piece together that they’re a long lost prince from a royal family or something, and you accept the personal challenge.

Your birthday rolls around and John sends you a new pair of shades, so you immediately sideline your old shades to try the new ones on. The whole ironic anime shades thing really wasn't your style; that was a little too much of Bro’s style that you didn't want to seem like copying. These new aviators are just old and out of style enough to be considered ironic, a fashion statement without being into fashion at all. They hang off your nose a little, too big for your face, but you’ll grow into them. You put your triangle shades on a blank space on your shelf next to some jars of dead things, a high honor among your most prized possessions. You vow to find John the best, most ironic of gifts to surpass the sheer awesomeness of these shades for his next birthday. You figure if you start looking and planning now you've got a solid four months to find something with the appropriate level of irony and sincerity for him; plus, you kind of owe him for like three or four years of missed birthdays, so you better make this one count.

  


Bro gives you a fistbump when you walk out of your room wearing your new shades, asking what you want for dinner for your birthday. You remind him that technically it’s his birthday too, tossing a hastily-wrapped gift his way (a cd of some of your latest mixes, with custom drawn album art complete with jpeg artifacts a la Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff- you usually email them to him, but figured the cd was a nice gesture.) He rips it open in a flash and you almost miss the grin pulling at his lips before he lapses back into poker face once more. You got your gift from him already this morning, a whole box of new film, half black and white and half color, and you couldn't wait to use it. He ruffles your hair before you can bat his hand away and ushers you out of the apartment, destination- Chuck E. Cheese. Ironically, of course, because you’re way too cool for that kid shit, but proceed to beat the crap out of every game you play with Bro and together end up with the most tickets, Bro giving you his so you can get the coolest prizes. You walk away with a new iPhone and a shopping bag of cheap bouncy balls and pixie sticks, the happiest and luckiest of 13 year olds.

  


Your new eyewear doesn't go unnoticed by your peers at school. While they cast glances your way, a few giggles and pointed fingers behind your back, the only comment you receive is a “Nice shades, Strider,” from a girl you’re pretty sure has a crush on you as you both pass in the hall. They know better than to pick on you again, so you glide through your school days relatively unnoticed once again. You’d rather go unnoticed than noticed, you figure, since you don’t exactly blend in anymore. Being the scrawny pale kid was okay until everyone started hitting puberty. 

Now while it was funny to watch the guys stumble over themselves and hear their voices crack and see all the girls get taller before boys could catch up, you were still nearly a full year younger than everyone in your class, so now you were singled out as the runt of the group instead of a bystander. This didn't last long, however, as you seemed to shoot up several inches almost overnight, your new height gave you an unexpected challenge when strifing with your brother, having to re-learn how to balance to compensate for your additional stature. Suddenly your favorite record shirts didn't fit you anymore, unable to cover your torso and too small to fit your shoulders, and your toes wore a hole in your favorite shoes, poking straight out of the front. Your voice started shifting as well, prompting you to speak even less in public for fear of it cracking in normal conversation. Fortunately, you didn't need to speak all that often and now seemed even cooler and more of the strong silent type than you had before. 

When the sex ed portion of health class rolls around, you surprise your peers by giving all the correct answers to the teacher’s questions while they all look at each other awkwardly and giggle each time someone says the words “penis” or “vagina.” What they didn't know was Bro had actually had his version of the sex talk with you not that long ago, complete with demonstrations by smuppets and an invitation to help him make some more videos for his website, should you feel so inclined. He tells you that sex is nothing to be ashamed about, it’s something a lot of people do in a lot of different ways with other partners, but you need to be smart about it, so feel free to ask questions and don’t be ashamed to raid the condom stash in the bathroom, lil bro, that’s what it’s there for and if you’re gonna do it I’d prefer you wrap it rather than get an STD. You start to ask what an STD is and he tells you to google it for more pictures, but they’re basically diseases for your dick, and no one wants that. After your talk you feel a little scarred for life, but glad you have a cool older brother that’ll be open about these things rather than just finding out from the internet and the limited scope of your health class. Your head started to throb halfway through Bro’s little lecture, though you chose to ignore it. It’s a little harder to ignore when you’re sitting in the middle of your health class, put in the spotlight once again for being the only person willing to speak up unabashedly about sex. You even teach the teacher a thing or two. 

Despite your cool appearance, you still feel pretty awkward about the whole subject. You’re familiar with the whole sex thing, hell you've been exposed to puppet porn since you were like 8. But what you see in porn and what you see in romance movies seem like two completely different concepts to you, and you don’t understand how they connect. You suppose if you ever get a girlfriend you can find out, but right now the prospect of dating anyone in your school isn't appealing to you and you don’t care to figure it out right now.

Bro’s career as a DJ suddenly takes off after he turns 21 and is able to finally get into the clubs that wouldn't let him in while he was underage, so now he hauls his equipment out of the apartment just after dinner most weekends. You don’t see him again until the next morning, and sometimes you don’t see him at all. You revel in having the apartment to yourself for once, taking over the futon in the living room and playing video games until you pass out, blasting music from your speakers and spinning on your turntables as loud as you want, though you refrain from walking around in just your underwear because you still feel unnerved whenever you walk past Cal, the puppet’s eyes staring through your soul and creeping you out. 

Bro also now deems you responsible enough to venture out on your own while he’s not around to chaperone you, too busy playing superstar DJ, so you sometimes take your camera or sketchbook and head to the local parks, sometimes hopping on a bus for the day on a weekend and venturing to a new corner of the city and learning firsthand how interesting the world is when seen through a 35mm lens. The city becomes your canvas, its inhabitants and landmarks your paint, and you try to challenge yourself to take photographs that change the way you view your surroundings. So while teenage girls take pictures of their lattes with their smartphones and slap a hipster filter on it and pretend it’s “deep,” you’re lying flat on your stomach in the middle of a park framing the perfect shot between two trees as two kids play Frisbee with their dog, a homeless man raiding a dumpster in the background, storm clouds forming overhead. The American dream with it’s own slice of darkness, you think, pressing the shutter button and capturing the moment.

You find the perfect present for John on eBay. It’s the actual bunny toy prop from the movie Con Air, and after verifying its legitimacy you buy it for him. Oh man, John is gonna shit bricks with this one, it’s so perfect you know he’ll love it. You talk Bro into giving you the money for it, promising him you’ll do extra chores around the apartment to make up for it, not that it matters since you do most of the cleaning around here anyways. It arrives in the mail and you carefully unwrap and re-wrap it in the most ironically shitty wrapping paper you own, a bright pink Hello Kitty abomination you snagged from the hall closet where Bro keeps all the holiday stuff, and send it off to Washington, trying not to seem too eager to hear John’s reaction when it finally gets to his house.

You talk John into skyping with you while he opens your gift so you can see his reaction for yourself, and lo and behold he does indeed shit bricks over the sheer epicness of your gift. You are the best friend ever, it is you, Dave Strider. You smirk smugly as he freaks out, gleefully reenacting the entire scene where he tells himself to “put the bunny back in the box.”

That night you have a dream where you were there in the room when John opened your package, and you got to see him with your own eyes how happy he was to get the bunny, and you’re surprised when he bounds over to you and wraps you up in a big hug, thanking you in a rush in your ear, his head right next to yours, black hair tickling your face, and you swear you can almost smell his body wash. After an awkward moment where you’re not sure if you’re entirely okay with this invasion of your personal space, you figure it’s just John, your oldest friend, and you hug him back, wrapping your arms around his torso and pulling you both closer together. Time seems to slow as you enjoy the moment wrapped in his arms- you’d almost forgotten what it was like to be held this way, as normally you avoided touching people like the plague. You wake shortly thereafter, still feeling the warm remains of his arms wrapped around you. Smiling at the thought, you snuggle back into your pillow and fall asleep.

You try to remember this dream each time you wake up from nightmares, which is becoming a regular occurrence when you try to sleep, hoping you’ll wake up wrapped in someone else’s arms instead of tangled in your sheets, a scream strangled in your throat. But soon the thought is no longer a comfort to you, transforming instead into one of the only things you remember about your nightmares, the sensation of being held down, of being helpless and powerless and no matter what you do, no matter how hard you thrash or how loud you scream there’s a weight pinning you down. You often have to pry yourself out of these night terrors once you recognize them for what they are, pulling yourself back into reality by reminding yourself _its just a dream just a dream get me out of here please just a dream cant hurt me just a fucking nightmare._

It comes as no surprise to you when you finally decide to spend most of your evenings messing around until you’re more than ready to completely pass out rather than try to sleep and have nightmares, finding that you feel less tired dropping straight into unconsciousness than if you willingly try to sleep. You only pass out after you've stayed up long enough, often nearly dead on your feet when the sun is just beginning to rise. While this leaves you pretty tired during the day, you make up for it by sleeping through some of your classes when the teacher isn't paying attention, hiding your closed eyes and the purpling rings courtesy of your insomnia underneath your sunglasses. You manage to keep your grades at the consistently average level they've always been at, and none would be the wiser to your lethargy except for your internet friends- Rose and Jade have already expressed their concern, and you know you've got a problem when John finally notices you’re not as quick with a sarcastic quip as you usually are. You decide you’d rather keep pretending you’re normal, after all it’s not like you haven’t tried to fix your problems by figuring out where they’re coming from, but nothing is working and honestly you’re tired of trying. You wake up some days wondering what it would be like to just sleep for a week, nightmares be damned, let your brain get all this bad shit out of your system in one fell swoop so you can go back to being normal again. Other days you wish you could just fall asleep and not wake up at all.


End file.
